made it up

Julia and I move into the house in about a fortnight. There are holes in the floors but the kitchen has got a coat of light mossy paint against bright, white trim and cabinets (pics to follow)!

Painting trim (and there's a lot of trim in this house) is not like demo is for your brain. Without the silence of sweat, painting trim is detailed, tedious work that leaves lots of room for folding thought on thought. How have you spent the hours and days of your life when you were not painting trim? It's a cruel, clear evaluative measure — I will tell you I have spent some worse hours, and that's probably saying something.

In a house way older than your grandma, there's not enough caulk or white paint in the world to make something ornate and warped, something that has seen some kicks and holds some walls, perfect again.

Although, caulk is amazing (cue laugh track).

Because we are not pro painters, we can't cut a perfect line with a brush. You get your trim all white, but then there's paint on the wall. You touch up the wall and get paint on the trim. It's like that Seuss story about the pink stain. After ~9hrs of trim painting my reverend Nana's words get said in the kitchen, "We do our best, for angles can do no better." Actually this line has some of the Irish-Austro inscrutability to it. Does she mean we must aspire to be angles? Or is it flipped — effort and intention are all that matters, all "bests" are of equal value? Are we angels already? I have to ask. In any case, or actually this case, I'm taking it as an invitation to accept the imperfect, beautiful things that come from our hands.

Sugar wrote, "Acceptance is a small, quiet room." I now think acceptance is painting 200 yards of trim in house you plan to live in. Acceptance is a project you might never finish and which lots of people won't really notice as a part of the whole. It's painting white on white and missing spots you only see later from ten feet away. It's gluing together what you can, painting over what you can, drawing lines where you can. Then you put down your brushes, wash your hands, and call it good enough to edge your days.

trim painting jam:

We've had a run-in with that good old design, cost, utility triumvirate, which is to say: prying up subfloors killed my cutie little Ikea hammer. No one is surprised.

In alternate reflections, hammers are insanely easy to gender. There's the "man hammer" which has a long handle, straighter bit for pulling nails, and is heavy. Lady hammers, a la miss Ikea — RIP — are shorter, lighter and the nail-pulling part is curvier and actually better at pulling nails.

Apparently children start to gender objects and activities around age three. My dev psych mom says some begin as early as eight months (pacifiers are a big first gendered object). They don't stop after that, which is probably why every handyperson we've met so far is a handyman and also why most of them can't believe my mom's ever handled a belt sander. We're very pro-lady hammer in this house, but capitalism seems to make for less utility in such a tool, same as it does for near-pocketless women's pants that wear out early and often at the crotch and joints.

even the ceilings, lilac. brad and i tear up the carpet only to find plywood. kia and i pry up the ply.

very special technique

opens all bottles and floors

the way-down floors

west roof off lilac room

What to say about demolition? It's a skill. At the beginning you are slow getting a blade in the x-acto knife, slow ripping out carpet, slow with the hammer. Then you figure it out. The specifics of the action evolve towards efficiency in your lower back, your arms, your hands. Suddenly it's all taking half the time. When you squat down the backs of your knees are slick with sweat. We're drinking a lot of Corona in here, folks. You can open a beer, easy, with the back of a hammer.

Kia and I cracked the male-labor-speech-code on Sunday afternoon pulling plywood subfloors. “WE ARE JUST YELLING,” we yelled. “EVERYTHING BUT THE CHEST BUMP.” When friends and family get in the house they act as strong and focused as I’ve seen them. With the busy precision of well-trained wait staff in a high-volume restaurant we move around the place aware of each other in space, improvising some choreography of service while we destroy the carpets, the subfloors beneath, and poke the ancient boards saying, “shit.” and “these look soft.” and “but look how beautiful.”

There is a family of squirrels I’ve seen climbing into the attic under the fascia. There is the small round door to the home of est. 5 million red ants. Their wide, low mound is surrounded by a flotilla of cigarette butts. At least two things are possible: people have, consciously or unconsciously, been throwing cigarette butts on the anthill and the ants have moved them away because, unlike people, 100 percent of ants can tell cigarettes are slow poison; OR ants have been collecting the butts and stacking them around their hill, like a city wall. I will position my butts accordingly and watch for what the ants do.

Here we go all round the house discovering. Horseshoe over the door-- we are lucky? Large hole in the century-old boards before the hearth — we are not lucky?

Here she is in her introductory phase:

horseshoe

over double entry doors

someone kicked through the back door a while ago

L-shaped kitchen

apartment living room

such carpets

curvesss

west bedroom

bob is here

oh hay

we put this in the mailbox, which the before family sometimes visits.

original living room

Carpets are very personal. I have a friend who sold vacuums door-to-door. Part of the sales pitch was to vacuum peoples' carpets for them with this super-vacuum and then show them all the effluence of their lives and bodies that had settled there. They had special white filters to pull out, coated in an inch of strange grey material, something not quite dust cause the fat content was so high. A butter of filth. Toe jam. They sold many vacuums. And recently I keep hearing ads on the radio for carpet cleaners — the basic message is you can't have people over for a BBQ if you don't get your carpets professionally cleaned first. That seems like a stretch, but let us never underestimate the intimacy, and thoosly the shame, of carpets. They hold the dust. They hold the smoke and the smell. They hold the stain. In exchange they are one thing only, comfortable underfoot.

Like most dirty things, pulling carpets is extremely satisfying. It goes fast. Everything looks and smells better. The acoustics of the room change radically. There's the rush-and-roulette feeling of uncovering old floor boards, which sometimes end before they reach the wall.

Before and not-quite after:

This is the little bedroom on the first floor, here with its carpet telling us all about how the before family walked around their bed and on the way to their closet. Carpets ≠ secret keepers.

And here are the wide, old boards telling us all about how the person who painted this room and ceiling white gave not two fucks about the wood floor. So much care flowing in opposite directions. We have, after all, not been very nice to the carpets, which we drew and quartered, stacked in what's essentially a dumpster-sized ikea bag, and paid to never see again.

"Someone went crazy or else a painter lived here who only used white paint."

Turns out we hallucinated presence of kitchen sink in the back apartment. Now all the appliances are out that lil kitchen looks a lot like any kind of room. At least it still smells like 100 years of cigarettes in there.

We are a little afraid of the house, like a rescue pet that might bite you. There are a million things to do and each task can be subdivided infinitely. How many whole-room coats of paint? I estimate: 40. How many hammer strikes? I don't estimate.

Daylight comes in under the back door. You open it, there are no stairs, just a three-foot void.

The family before us has left us some gifts:

1 mini bottle Goldschlager.

1, mostly full, bottle orange juice.

One "Party Time" frozen pizza.

Later, with dust in my mouth, I will drink the orange juice so grateful.

That first night there are only two things to do: drink champagne, bang on the plaster wall over the fireplace till bricks.

this is like trying to get a label off a glass bottle, picking a scab, sudoku. you gotta get that perfect angle so the big pieces will fall off, very satisfying. start from the bottom and work down. ~10 hrs wall. the ring of hammer on chisel is almost dog-level. we put toilet paper in our ears.

We're three or four hours in here. Everyone has hammered their pointer finger knuckle at least once.

intermission ...

Other gifts from the family before: three bags cement, double dolphin trash can.

Meanwhile, upstairs, we are priming out the darkest blue walls. I find a yellow guitar pick. The window falls out of its frame. Somewhere between blue and not blue is a seriously beautiful primer palimpsest.

We do not prime the inside of the closet where we find tiny footprints on the sloped ceiling and my mother says, "there must have been a bassinet in there."

Welcome to THIS IS DAY BED, where I write about inhabiting and renovating an old house in Denver. I do this crazy thing alongside my moms and most excellent friends.

We are using our imaginations

The house, great ship for the happiness we picture late behind lids, series of rooms moving elliptically through time in the light, will be ours in a week. We will take occupancy of the Original House, est. 1896. We will nice the Back House, a 2004 attached apartment, for someone else to live in for a while. But before heavy planning we get to have fantasy planning i.e. poetics of the easy, sweet, nascent-concrete.

current foundations first

Drinking

water with cut ginger, rosemary + sage out an old Casal Garcia Vinho Verde bottle. Drunk from a paper bag while sitting on the locked-up patio furniture outside the first-ever Quiznos at intersection of 13th and Grant. Good, cheap wine — $9.99. Lovely blue glass.

Waiting on

Update: half an hour was too long for the meat and too short for the carrots.

Light outside

graying teal. It’s June & almost 9 pm. Finally it has cooled way down.

Listening to

original house poems

Now is a good time to mention that I've succumb to the bright, bright hoardy aspirational image machine (pinterest). It triggers something manic and doggedly comprehensive in me to sort by taste, feels like battle against the hydra-headed in a game of go fish. Anyway the fishing was good and embed-able. Here are sketches of current house layouts followed by plans for renovation so vague they're more like daydream odes.